Despite feeling guilty he was eating when the villagers were still locked out, he did as she ordered. Doing his best not to enjoy the food, he tucked into potatoes, sausages, and overcooked peas. For a time he got lost in doing one simple thing, lifting a spoon to his mouth and eating. He didn’t even notice how much of a relief it was. Nothing he’d heard since entering the Cosmodrome had been good news. From things Bugsy, Tinker, and the Lama had said, he gathered that not only were things still fucked up in Talas, but that the nightmare world he’d seen there had continued to spread. A whole team of aces had gone in and hadn’t been able to do a thing about it. Fucking depressing. He and Olena had been debriefed by some nondescript suit whose face Marcus forgot the moment he left him. Guy hadn’t really seemed interested, and Babel hadn’t deigned to speak with him herself.

As soon as he wiped the tin plate clean, all the miserable facts fell back on him. They were inside, but so what? There was nothing but bad news, and the only people he cared about were still locked outside, with the contagion heading toward them like some all-consuming nightmare of a dust storm. It was coming; of that Marcus was completely sure.

“I gotta talk to Babel,” he said. “Just talk sense to her, you know?”

“I don’t think she wants to speak to you,” Olena said, with a flatness that Marcus read as sarcastic.

“What are we going to do, then? We can’t just sit here. Maybe we should get the fuck out. No one would stop us from leaving. Let’s get the others and keep moving. There’s got to be someplace we could hold up, just be by ourselves.”

“And let the world go to hell?” There was that flatness again.

“I’m just trying … to … to do something!”

She slipped an arm around back and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I know, Marcus. You’re right. We should go. Get supplies. Water. All the food they’ll let us take. Fuel. Whatever we can get, and then go.”

“Should we tell your father?”

“Fuck him,” Olena said. “He doesn’t care about me. I’m better off without him.” And then, with a deeper level of conviction, “We’re better off without him.”

Marcus pressed his lips, gently, to her forehead. “All right. I’m gonna go see if they’ll help us.” He jutted his chin toward where the aces were milling about after their briefing ended. “Tinker, at least. He seems decent.”

Slithering through the crowd toward them, Marcus noticed someone who made him pull up. A black woman—the first he’d seen in a long time—had just emerged from one of the many corridors leading out of the main warehouse. It wasn’t just her race he noticed, though. It was the pained expression on her blood-smeared face and the way she held a hand wrapped in bloody gauze clamped at the wrist with her other hand. She met Marcus’s gaze, paused a moment to stare at him, but then carried on as several people helped clear the way through the crowd for her.